The Sentence Is Death

He went through the ticket barrier and started walking up the platform, staying behind the yellow line but still fairly close to the edge. At the same time, the delayed train appeared in the distance, moving towards him. Police Constable Salim told us what happened next.

‘I’d just arrived at the station for the evening shift when it all kicked off. I knew we had a PUT before I got the call over my radio . . .’

‘What’s a PUT?’ I asked.

‘Person Under a Train.’

‘We also call them “one unders”,’ McCoy added.

‘I could hear screaming,’ Salim went on. ‘And the driver had sounded his horn, which is standard practice. So I knew something was up and I went straight to the platform, which is how I came to be the first on the scene.

‘My immediate thought was that it must be a suicide. But King’s Cross is an end-of-line station so we don’t get that many of those. Anyway, there’s the Harry Potter experience on the main concourse and that cheers people up. So maybe it was an accidental – but that doesn’t happen very often either. I don’t know. I just wanted to get there and see what I could do to help.

‘Well, it turned out that the poor guy had made it about two-thirds of the way up the platform before he’d slipped over the side, straight into the path of the oncoming train. He might have been lucky. He might just have been injured – badly. But I’m afraid it wasn’t like that. He’d fallen across both rails and he’d lost both his legs and he’d been decapitated, so he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.’

My iPhone was on low battery and I was writing all this down. He waited for me to catch up. Both McCoy and Salim knew I was a writer and they were enjoying talking to me. It’s funny how many people are keen to have their work described in books.

‘My first job was to clear the area. There were a lot of people screaming. A couple of them had been sick. There was one woman in shock. And of course there were the usual perverts filming the whole thing on their mobile phones. Most of them were wearing football kit – scarves, hoodies, beanies . . . that sort of thing. It was hard to tell who was who. I started to move people back and I told them not to leave the immediate area. We’d need to take names and addresses, witness statements and all the rest of it. By now, quite a few more officers had arrived and I knew BT Central Control were on to it. The London Ambulance Service and the Air Ambulance Service would be on the way. My biggest worry was that someone was going to have a heart attack. It’s happened before and it just makes everything twice as complicated.

‘We managed to get a cordon up and we had the environment under control, but now we had to get the deceased out from under the train. And we only had forty-five minutes.’

‘Why was that?’ I asked. I was fascinated by the whole procedure.

‘It’s the cost,’ Salim explained. ‘When this sort of thing happens, we have to clear the platforms and keep the trains running. We can’t afford to hang around.’

‘Was it you who got the body out?’ Hawthorne asked.

Salim nodded. ‘Yeah. You get a fifty-quid bonus if you’re up for that and I’m saving up for a holiday with my mum. It could have been worse. The train hadn’t been moving very fast so there were no body parts flying into the air or anything like that. And there was no need for a specialist unit to lift up the train. The driver was pretty shaken up but I got him to shunt the train back and it was fairly easy after that. We got the body out and I bagged up the hands and all the rest of it. After that, DC McCoy arrived and he took over.’

McCoy did the same now.

‘There wasn’t a lot left for me to do,’ he said. ‘I got the dead man’s ID from his wallet and I got the North Yorkshire police to send round a couple of PCs to inform the widow. She was at home with two young daughters and I didn’t want her to hear it over the phone. She left for London straight away and I actually saw her the day after. Susan Taylor. Totally shocked. Couldn’t believe it had happened. Her husband hadn’t been well and the two of them had financial difficulties, which is to say they were skint like everyone else, but there was no history of depression. In fact, she said his trip had been a big success. The two of them had booked a restaurant, planning a celebration on Sunday night.’ He drew a breath. ‘Well, that didn’t happen.’

‘What was he doing in London?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘Seeing a friend.’

Hawthorne waited for more information, then saw that McCoy had nothing more to add.

‘That’s all she told me,’ he explained. ‘I interviewed her: she was staying at the Holiday Inn off the Euston Road. But I couldn’t get much sense out of her. The poor woman was in pieces. Her husband under a train! The two of them had been married twenty years. She had to ID the body and that was horrible for her. I’d already decided it was an unexplained. I didn’t think there was anything much she could add.’

‘An unexplained?’ I jotted down the word.